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I have been thinking a lot about this. There is also a stat that says something like only 15% of software engineers in America are female. But doesn't this make complete sense? Ten years ago, it was not cool to be a nerd, computers were not cool, technology was not cool. So there was this small subset of apparently white males using their brains and investing in tech.

So of course now there is an imbalance, and the only reason anyone even cares is because tech is cool, computers are cool, nerds are cool. So now everyone wants a piece of the pie. Is anyone checking the diversity of waste management employees? Publishing that information with infographics? Getting it in the media? Nope.

I think if you ask pretty much any male software engineer if he wants more women in the work place? Pretty sure he's gonna say yes. I'm making a joke. But seriously. Like I said these things take time, so I expect it would be at least ten to fifteen years before gender equality is achieved in big software and tech companies.

Good points - and something came up on a diversity report in South African IT recently. The proportion of people over 40 in IT jobs that are white male is overwhelming. But for younger generations it's a lot more representative in terms of ethnicity.

But the stats on women are stay stubbornly low and don't improve. And there's a high attrition rate as you increase in age - iirc women leave IT careers to go do something else in high numbers (I'll try and find a link for this), at least in part because many workplaces aren't female friendly. So you end up in a lot with first year programming cohorts of 50/50 splits, but which become more imbalanced as the group ages.

Personally I think we're already at the end of that second to ten years you talk about - we've known this is an issue for 20 years, and it's more like 15-17 years since computers were a nerd thing...

Nich_Hustler is right, got a good point there. But I still doubt about the equality. Look at the percentage of male gamers and female gamers. It's been ages but there's still a vast difference between them. My point is, females don't have that much interest in computer and technology as a male do. Yeah, lots of women came forward to tech but I still don't think they could come closer to the number of males.